02-13-2024, 12:28 AM
Ryatah
WHEN I WAS SHIPWRECKED I THOUGHT OF YOU
IN THE CRACKS OF LIGHT I DREAMED OF YOU
She likes the Ruins, even if they don’t really feel as if they belong here.
The wars fought here were not theirs, and she does not know who the blood long-since dried into the dirt belongs to, but there is a haunted quality to it that feels familiar. It feels the way she imagines it might look like if someone split her open — the wreckage of something once beautiful, the kind of thing you look at and wonder what it had looked like before it was torn apart but somehow knowing that to rebuild it would mean you lose some of the original allure.
She is used to being made up of broken parts, pieced together with both magic and a strange, suffering kind of willpower — an unyielding need to stay alive but to regret nearly every moment of it. She cannot explain why being here feels like a knot finally loosening in her chest, as if the mist that hangs in the air is easier to choke on than breathing in the too-sweet air of the meadow.
The gold that is streaked across the ground catches her eye, and she pauses momentarily to survey it. She leaves behind her own trail of shimmering stardust, but this is different, almost blood-like. It leads her to a stallion, dapple gray (and of course her wretched little heart lurches for just a moment, as it always does) with a crown of thorns digging cruelly into his skin, streaked in crimson and gold.
“Jarris,” she breathes his name, and it feels familiar even though she can’t be sure she has ever spoken it. Maybe it is just her magic retrieving his name, but it feels deeper than that. His blood pulses and hers keeps time, and all at once she is brought back to a feeling of crushing despair and hopelessness, of sharp rocks and an unforgiving ocean — and the sensation of her immortality being ripped away, called by someone else. “I know you. But…I don’t know if you ever knew me,” she says, a soft frown forming under the golden light of the halo that hovers above her head. “My name is Ryatah.”
The wars fought here were not theirs, and she does not know who the blood long-since dried into the dirt belongs to, but there is a haunted quality to it that feels familiar. It feels the way she imagines it might look like if someone split her open — the wreckage of something once beautiful, the kind of thing you look at and wonder what it had looked like before it was torn apart but somehow knowing that to rebuild it would mean you lose some of the original allure.
She is used to being made up of broken parts, pieced together with both magic and a strange, suffering kind of willpower — an unyielding need to stay alive but to regret nearly every moment of it. She cannot explain why being here feels like a knot finally loosening in her chest, as if the mist that hangs in the air is easier to choke on than breathing in the too-sweet air of the meadow.
The gold that is streaked across the ground catches her eye, and she pauses momentarily to survey it. She leaves behind her own trail of shimmering stardust, but this is different, almost blood-like. It leads her to a stallion, dapple gray (and of course her wretched little heart lurches for just a moment, as it always does) with a crown of thorns digging cruelly into his skin, streaked in crimson and gold.
“Jarris,” she breathes his name, and it feels familiar even though she can’t be sure she has ever spoken it. Maybe it is just her magic retrieving his name, but it feels deeper than that. His blood pulses and hers keeps time, and all at once she is brought back to a feeling of crushing despair and hopelessness, of sharp rocks and an unforgiving ocean — and the sensation of her immortality being ripped away, called by someone else. “I know you. But…I don’t know if you ever knew me,” she says, a soft frown forming under the golden light of the halo that hovers above her head. “My name is Ryatah.”
AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH —
BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE
@jarris